Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
War
Once West Africa’s Rising Star, Ivory Coast Faces Dangerous Horizon
010 months ago
If the overthrow of a a dictatorship in Egypt taught us what social movements can accomplish through nonviolent resistance, then the crisis engulfing the Ivory Coast is a lesson in how even the trappings of democracy can fail to keep a fragile nation from breaking apart.
Though the battle for leadership of the country rages on, the showdown in Abidjan could mark the final convulsion of violence following a disputed presidential election last year. The conflict has left as many as 1,500 dead and pushed several hundred thousand from their homes.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In fact, in contrast with the whirlwind revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, which caught the West by surprise and continue to bewilder European, U.S. and Arab officials, Cote d’Ivoire was supposed to be wrapping up a long transition from civil war to peaceful political processes. The 2010 election was supposed to cap a multi-year, United Nations-monitored process of rebuilding. So the violence that engulfs the nation now is particularly frustrating.
“People in Africa are tired of wars. My generation is a generation of action, we want to see our continent develop,” Global Voices blogger Julie Owono told Al Jazeera. ”We are aware of the potential of the one billion inhabitants [of the] continent, and we are also more than ever conscious that development can never be achieved in times of war.”
As a top cocoa exporter, Cote d’Ivoire was once a patch of prosperity in a region scarred by poverty and conflict, and its people have struggled to reclaim their status as a model of stability. Today, the traumatized refugees who’ve escaped to their unstable neighbor Liberia could even be considered luckier than the throngs of Ivorians who’ve been displaced.
After international sanctions and condemnation against incumbent “strongman” Laurent Gbagbo, the internationally recognized President-elect Allasane Ouattara finally seems poised to take power. But Gbagbo’s posture parallels in some ways the insular stubbornness of other delegitimized leaders. As of this writing, he remains deadlocked in failed negotiations over a resolution.
Gbagbo probably doesn’t have the military might to cling to power Gaddafi style. And the regional body ECOWAS has indicated that it will not pursue a face-saving, power-sharing deal, such as the one arranged in Kenya following 2007 post-election violence. Rather, it will enforce the original internationally recognized election result: Ouattara’s victory. It may even be too late for Gbagbo to stage a semi-dignified exile, as Ouattara’s administration, which has been operating as a sort of shadow government since the election, may try to prosecute him so that he can, in the words of a spokesperson quoted in the New York Times, “answer for his actions.”
Yet Gbagbo is not the only one in Cote d’Ivoire who must be held to account for the blood staining Ivorian streets. As African political analyst Gnaka Lagoke noted on Democracy Now!, “it is not a matter of angel or demon, or somebody who’s a hero and somebody who’s a villain.” Since both sides have taken part in illegitimate killings, he continued, “both of them are tragic heroes, and they are in the central part of the tragedy of the country.”
Another aspect of that tragedy resides in Cote d’Ivoire’s political polarities. There are differences in Gbagbo and Ouattara’s policy positions: Gbagbo, a former school teacher, trade unionist, and exiled activist, has been billed as a socialist. Former IMF official Ouattara presents a more centrist, Western-framed position. And beyond the two rivals’ differences, Ivorian society also faces ethnic and religious divisions.
Horace Campbell sees power struggles between Muslims and Christians, north and south, driving the conflict. Campbell details Ouattara’s important history in Pambazuka:
One of [Ouattara's] parents had migrated from Burkina Faso although he himself had joined the ruling circles rising to become Prime Minister under Boigny. Xenophobia was buttressed by religious chauvinism as the opposition to the leadership of Ouattara was wrapped in religious garb. In 1995 President [Henri] Bedie had disqualified Ouattara from the presidential race on the grounds that he was not a citizen even though less than three years earlier both men had served in the cabinet of Boigny. Ouattara was excluded on grounds of religion and citizenship and disqualification alienated many of the citizens from the North who followed the Islamic faith. This chauvinism and xenophobia was given currency as a cultural force under the label of Ivoirite (Ivorian-ness).
For now, such debates about national identity and political legitimacy have been subsumed by the looming humanitarian crisis. The very best Ivorians could hope for at this point may simply be an end to the carnage. The rampant violation and degradation of human rights–culpability for which may ultimately fall on both parties–has broken Cote d’Ivoire’s lapsed promise as West Africa’s rising star.
But Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, told me the current crisis can’t block the road forward:
What is needed now is for continued pressure… to make sure that there is true protection of civilians, to ensure that the will of the Ivorian people as expressed in the elections of November 2010 is respected, but also to look toward what’s needed in the Ivory Coast, which is this national healing and reconciliation….. one consistent refrain that you hear throughout the country from some of the people of Cote d’Ivoire is that they’re tired of war.
Commentator Ayo Johnson, in an email exchange, said that in the regional political context, “the Ivorians have a responsibility not only to live in peace but to prevent West Africa from decline.”
But it’s hard to fathom how Ivorians will chart their own destiny from here on, now that international forces, mainly France and the United Nations, have taken a stake in charting it for them. Will the country’s political process be dogged by anxieties about post-colonial interference? On the flipside, will remnants of the old regime use the presence of former colonizer France as a pretext for continued fighting, playing on familiar anti-Western-imperialist rhetoric?
And once the conflict is resolved, can factions that have so far single-mindedly pursued their own communities’ interests reorient themselves toward rebuilding as one nation? Woods notes that Ouattara, as “president of the entire country,” must “first and foremost hold people accountable, including people who were his supporters that violated human rights,” in accordance with U.N. and ECOWAS resolutions.
Today, as the battles in Abidjan drag on and diplomatic interventions proceed in fits and starts, just thinking about the pending challenge of “national reconciliation” is an exhausting exercise. Then again, nothing compares to the fatigue of endless war, and that is what the Ivorian people understand all too well, and what the global community, in turning away from West Africa over the past decade, has allowed itself to forget.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Call for Peace as Racial Justice Still Rings
01 year ago
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. “broke the silence” on the war on Vietnam in 1967, he shattered the establishment rhetoric on America’s mission in Southeast Asia. His speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break the Silence,” delivered at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan, still has revolutionary ring to it as we approach MLK Day more than 40 years later.
Taking a politically risky and unpopular stance–and bucking the advice of some of his most trusted advisors–King drew a link between the destruction of war in Vietnam and the devastation of America’s stratified society. He framed the independence struggle of the Vietnamese as the freedom struggle of communities of color at home.
Civil rights advocates who had preceded King had often bound up patriotism with ideas of racial uplift–for instance, in the Double V campaign of World War II. But King recognized the cancerous injustice of the Vietnam War:
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.
Today, antiwar activism is much more entwined with movements for human rights and racial justice, thanks in large part to King’s prescience. But the march of war continues to trample souls, in distant battlefields and on blighted American streets. And some activists fear the antiwar movement has waned since the 2008 election, which drained momentum from the opposition that flourished under the Bush administration and left some groups less willing to challenge a presidency hailed as a civil rights victory to itself.
In the coming days, grassroots groups around the country will remember King’s stance on the war and take stock of how much, or how little, the country has progressed since King first broke his silence.
In New York City, Iraq Veterans against the War will bring together community members in the Bronx for a reading of King’s speech. IVAW organizer and Iraq veteran Andrew Johnson said that this time, the silence may be harder to penetrate:
The mobilization of the American people against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might be more difficult than against Vietnam. Casualties are lower, of course. Also, there is no draft, which allows most of the American public to ignore the problem without facing such a direct impact as a loved one being drafted. Most major news outlets do not offer serious reports about the wars…. It is important to get messages like those from “Beyond Vietnam,” but it is hard to do in a climate of apathy.
When King told his audience, “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home,” he inverted the prevailing notion that the price of national security would be borne solely by the country we designated as the enemy. He was advancing a globalization of the civil rights movement that was already underway. As historian Mary Dudziak has pointed out, “Third World” activists, embroiled in their on post-war, anti-colonial liberation movements, had watched the protests in Birmingham closely, seeking inspiration and a platform to challenge Washington’s hypocrisy.
King feared that eventually humankind’s capacity to self-destruct would grow faster than its capacity for compassion. Literary scholar David Bromwich wrote that King’s perspective on modern warfare was shaped by the fact that as technology evolved, “Things built over ages can be made to vanish in an instant under its annihilating stroke. That is what happened to the ancient culture, the farms, and the forests of Vietnam under the unleashed assault of American air power.” The methods of war are increasingly mechanized today, enabling an unmanned drone to destroy instantly an enemy on the ground, or the unfortunate civilians and children caught in the crosshairs.
Violence has a perverse way of reconfiguring social divides and loyalties, King noted:
So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
Tragically, the commemorations of King this year come just days after the shootings in Arizona exposed the violence poisoning the country’s political arena. The senselessness of the carnage bears out King’s imagery of “a society gone mad on war,” caught in a spiral of militarization that yielded only “might without morality, and strength without sight.”
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink told Colorlines that King’s uncompromising antiwar stance rings as true as ever today:
You change Vietnam to Iraq or you change Vietnam to Afghanistan, and you have the most powerful speech you can hear about why the wars that we’re engaged in are wrong, how they are wars against people of color, how they are racist wars, how we don’t care about our own soldiers–people who are struggling here at home just to get a job or an education, whom we’re sending overseas to kill poor people. Unfortunately, it’s not so much an echo of the past; it’s a clarion call to the present.
Other Kings
There is a Martin Luther King, Jr., that we may not recognize from elementary school textbooks, the human rights activist who has galvanized generations of resistance movements from the Horn of Africa to death row. Though many of his successors have taken a more radical tone or diverged from the nonviolent tactics he promoted, his message against war endures. That’s why some Pan-Africanist commentary on southern Sudan’s independence referendum this month invoked the preacher’s words. And Hugo Chavez, proud foe of American hegemony, recently hailed King as a martyr.
A statement commemorating King from the New York-based Pakistan Solidarity Network frames “Beyond Vietnam” as an essentially anti-imperialist critique:
As King urged, we must imagine our work holistically, because the imperial project we are resisting does not obey any boundary: the “War on Terror” has created a social, legal, and economic reality that is destroying countless people of color and migrants at home and world-round.
Yet King’s words are subject to distortion as well. His comments on Zionism, for instance, have been repackaged to bolster Israeli aggression in the occupied territories. His early death left open the challenge of interpreting and internalizing his legacy.
In a 2009 essay criticizing the politically sanitized, mainstream portrayals of King, Alan Singer argued:
If Dr King had not been assassinated, but had lived to become an old radical activist constantly questioning American policy, I suspect he would never have become so venerated. It is better for a country to have heroes who are dead, because they cannot make embarrassing statements opposing continuing injustice and unnecessary wars.
King was in fact considered an unwelcome troublemaker for most of his short life. The anti-war and antipoverty politics he’d begun to put at the forefront of his activism had drawn increasingly unflattering commentary in the run up to his assassination. We can celebrate that he lived long enough to further a legacy of antiwar activism rooted in racial justice.
This year, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization historically tied to the civil rights movement that now campaigns on every continent, draws inspiration from King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech in its new campaign, “Demilitarization of Life & Land.”
Focusing on the Middle East and Latin America, the group’s mission statement centers on “Resisting the militarization of territory (high schools, farm lands, military bases, whole nations) and of our bodies (through military recruitment, weapons sales, threats and acts of war),” and campaigning for “peaceful relations through grassroots diplomacy, protective accompaniment of threatened communities, and a federal budget with new priorities.”
At the annual King Peace Program at the King Center in Atlanta today, coordinated by the American Friends Service Committee, community members are revisiting King’s Vietnam speech as a touchstone for contemplating today’s peace movement. Timothy Franzen, a program director with AFSC-Atlanta, pointed to “the striking connections between a bloated military budget, a broken domestic economy, and the institutional racism we see in our schools and communities.”
The financing of war at the expense of “programs for social uplift,” Franzen said, “has created a situation where low-income youth often get caught up in two of our country’s most destructive systems of violence and oppression, the military and prison industrial systems. Both thrive on tax dollars, racial inequity, and the constant production of enough fear to garner unquestioning support [from] the general public.”
When participants in today’s event read from King’s speech, their words will outline the same vision impressed on the audience at Riverside Church in 1967. When he looked “Beyond Vietnam,” King imagined transcendence and convergence: the weaving together of struggles that we’ve always been taught to keep separate, to form “a single garment of destiny.”
Naomi Campbell Defends Her Blood Diamond Testimony
01 year ago
So did Naomi Campbell know that the “dirty-looking stones” she received after a middle of the night knock on her bedroom door were from ex-Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor, or didn’t she?
That’s the mystery in front of attorneys now, after actress Mia Farrow took to the stand following Campbell’s testimony last week. ABC News reports that Farrow contradicted the British supermodel’s account of what happened thirteen years ago at a dinner party held at Nelson Mandela’s home. Carole White, Campbell’s ex-agent who is also suing the supermodel for breach of contract, sided with Farrow and said that Campbell did indeed know that it was Taylor who gave her the diamonds.
While on the stand, Campbell, polished and cool in a gigantic beehive hairdo and a creamy yellow cardigan and dress, bristled at prosecutors’ suggestions that she might know more than she was letting on. However, she also claimed she had no idea what a blood diamond was, and did not know who Charles Taylor was even though they socialized together at an intimate dinner party that night in September 1997. She also said she had no idea that Liberia was a country. Lying in the special court for Sierra Leone is a crime punishable by up to two years in prison, but it’s unlikely anything so serious will happen to Campbell, or Farrow.
The AP reports Campbell issued a statement Tuesday: “I’ve no motive here. Nothing to gain. I am a black woman who has and will always support good causes especially relating to Africa. I’ve never taken any of the jobs offered to me, over my 25 years as a model, from companies that were for apartheid in South Africa.”
The former Liberian president has been charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for leading Sierra Leone’s bloody civil war in the late 1990s.
How Time’s Aisha Cover Obscures the Horror of War
01 year ago
On Monday, Time magazine will hit newsstands and Ipads with its full story on the plight of women in Afghanistan — and the disturbing cover image that’s already been intensely debated on the Internet.
The photo is of 18-year-old Aisha, a light brown Afghan woman with piercing eyes, a thick mane of dark hair, and her nose cut off. Her husband also sliced off her ears after she ran away from her in-law’s home, where she was being beaten so badly she thought she would die.
It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to look at the picture of Aisha and not feel horror, anger, fear. What’s to be done? Time’s editors have just the solution. The story’s headline reads: “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” Critics, including Muslim women bloggers, are accusing Time of exploiting Aisha to gather support for Obama’s futile war in Afghanistan and boost dwindling sales of the magazine as well.
But Time isn’t the only with Photoshop and a political agenda.
Photography, war and women’s lives are the focus of artist Rosemarie Romero’s new solo exhibit, “Sexual War Politics,“ which opened last week at the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami.
The exhibit is a series of photomontages in which white women’s bodies have been visually escavated and scenes of war have been placed where a pale belly or breast or buttock once was. In one piece, a blond woman stands with her legs spread, her hands on her hips, hair tousled. But her torso, including her breasts and vagina, have been replaced with the image of what appears to be an alley or hallway that’s been bombed and where soldiers are gathered. A rifle is propped up against the wall, which in this case is the woman’s right thigh. (Scroll down for images from the show.)
The effect is jarring. Most people don’t watch online porn or open up Playboy to look at naked women alongside images of soldiers guarding borders or a man dying on the ground.
Romero, who’s 24-years-old and an MFA student at the University of Florida, says that when people first see the photomontages at a distance, they’re titillated and drawn to the women’s faces or spread legs or exposed breasts. When they get closer and realize what they’re looking at, the party’s over. They’re disturbed, repulsed.
“I wanted to make a commentary on voyeurism, how victims are photographed, how women are photographed. The way they seem in the media,” says Romero, who’s Dominican.
Part of what makes “Sexual War Politics” so successful artistically and politically is that it takes into account the degree to which both porn images and war photos in and of themselves now largely fail to move us.
The editors at Time magazine were preparing for outrage over putting such a disturbing picture on their cover. Their managing editor reported that the staff consulted with child psychologists before deciding to run the photograph of Aisha with her missing nose. But the reaction they had expected never materialized. As the AP noted, very little of the discussion has centered on the shock of seeing the mutilated face of a young woman.
In a visually saturated culture like ours, it may be that we are reaching a point where we can no longer see violence without — as Romero’s exhibit suggests — putting it out of context.
In one of her pieces titled “Bomb Shell,” the perky left breast and torso of a woman has been removed and in its place is the image of a building that’s been bombed. Romero says she didn’t realize how violent the porn names were until she adopted them as titles for her pieces. Taken out of context, they revealed more.
Out of context.
The more I’ve looked at the picture of Aisha this week, the more I’ve found something that’s as disturbing as her mutilation and Time’s call to war: the beauty of the image.
In the cover photograph, Aisha’s hair is thick and wavy as if it had been carefully arranged in a New York studio. The camera has captured her at a moment when she’s staring at us from the corner of her eyes, her lips slightly parted as if she’s about to speak. The light falls across her pale brown cheeks, picks up the contrast in the shawl covering her dark hair. The nose, cut away, the flesh having healed as one commentator wrote into a “heart shape,” is the only indication that this young woman’s life is endangered.
It’s a photograph in the tradition of the National Geographic, where brown and black women and men and even children are rendered in bright colors, made exotic, almost desirable, and placed alongside images of whales and polar bears. The pain of hunger or war or disease is eerily absent. The images — out of context — are made more palatable to audiences.
It was National Geographic whose editors put an Afghan girl on their cover in the 1980s. Sharbat Gula was photographed in a refugee camp and this became “the” image of the war along the Afghan border at the time, even though the photographer never recorded her name.
Sharbat’s picture, like that of Aisha’s, was a palette of rich colors: the haunting green of her large eyes, the light brown hues of her face, the dark cherry red of the shawl. With a nose intact, Sharbat could have appeared on the cover of Vogue as Afghan chic.
What were the photographers thinking?
In Aisha’s case, South African photographer Jodi Bieber, who took the photo for Time, says in a video that she was struck by the beauty of the young woman. It captivated her. She saw Aisha not as a victim but as a survivor.
But what if Aisha had been unattractive by Western standards? What if her eyes were crossed or her hair cut badly or her skin a rich dark black?
Even with the mutilation, the photograph conforms to an aesthetic beauty we’re familiar with from women’s magazines and it’s that, which I imagine, helps American viewers (I’d add white viewers) feel they have a connection to what they are seeing: “How awful, how beautiful, we should do something to save Aisha.”
Michelle Chen reported on Time’s cover and the savior complex earlier this week. Some women’s rights advocates are more than willing to support Obama’s futile war on the flimsy pretext that it will save women’s lives. Other advocates are, fortunately, clear-headed, recalling that the Soviets used the same rationale for staying in Afghanistan and we can see how much liberation they brought to women there.
A National Geographic team tracked Sharbat almost 20 years after her picture graced the magazine’s cover. She hadn’t learned to read but she hoped her own daughters would have more opportunities. She didn’t know that millions of people had seen her face — or that they had paid to do so.
War photography, women’s faces and race have a long, complicated relationship, one that has taken some decidedly bizarre turns, as in the case of Rita Hayworth.
Hayworth, who was born Margarita Carmen Cansino (her father was a Spaniard), changed her name so she’d stop getting minor “Hispanic” roles in films. She also had her hairline altered through electrolysis and her wavy hair dyed red so that by the time she became a coveted pinup girl, she was white.
Soldiers favored Hayworth’s image during World War II and millions of copies of her picture traveled with them into war. She was considered a “bombshell” and so when the first nuclear bomb was tested in 1945, an image of her decorated the missile.
She hadn’t given her consent.
The story has a science fiction quality to it: A biracial woman makes herself white to get work and her image ends up on the weapon that will be used to kill people of color.
Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, has written that he published Aisha’s picture not to support the war but to show “what is actually happening on the ground.” The problem is he forgot the ground.
Granted, a cover photo can’t serve too many purposes, not even more than one really. But placing the image of a young woman who’s been mutilated outside of the context in which the horror has happened obscures the reality of the situation and conceals those who are responsible.
Here, I’m thinking of Phan Thị Kim Phúc.
The 1972 picture of her as a child, naked, her light brown body burning from napalm, running, revealed the cruelty of the war in Vietnam and actually of the 20th century. It unmasked what was happening on the ground, precisely because it showed Kim Phúc running down the road along with other children, soldiers behind and to the side, in the background the sky had been replaced with ominous man-made clouds.
I’m not suggesting that a photograph should have been taken of Aisha as she was attacked. But it’s a disservice to the reality of war to have her image so carefully constructed and divorced from its context: the men and women dying at the hands of American forces, the collaboration of Pakistan spies and the Taliban.
It suggests that photojournalists and their editors today, unlike their 1970s counterparts, might be leaving the hard work of revealing what’s actually happening on the ground to young artists of color like Romero.
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U.S. Makes First Appearance at Hiroshima Bombing Memorial
01 year ago
It took 65 years but the United States finally decided to send an ambassador to Japan to mark the solemn anniversary today of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This would have been respectful, though long overdue, except for one fact: It comes at the same time that Obama’s administration is negotiating with Tokyo officials to increase the American military presence in Japan.
The Aug. 6, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima killed 140,000 people in a city that 350,000 men and women called home. Thousands died later of illness and injuries. Monday, Aug. 9, will mark the 65th anniversary of the second time the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, this time on Nagasaki.
The average age of those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima is now 76 years old and they are still trying to get the Japanese government to recognize their ailments as being related to the bombing. The almost seven decades since the Hiroshima bombing hasn’t erased the terrifying memories. Survivor Mikiso Iwasa told ABC News that his mother “was a burnt black piece of mass dripping with bodily fluids. My mother was killed as a thing. Not as a human.”
According to media outlets like Reuters and ABC, the decision to have the U.S. ambassador present at today’s ceremony is a signal that Obama really means it when he says he wants nuclear disarmament. That might be true but it just might also be that he wants to play nice to help with his other deal: finding a new site for a controversial American airbase.
Obama’s administration has been in tricky negotiations with Japan to relocate the air base so that more American soldiers can be stationed in the country. The controversy led Japan’s last prime minister to resign in June. The U.S. has about 49,000 military personnel in Japan now.
The airbase made international headlines in 1995 when three American soldiers kidnapped and raped a school girl. The men served prison terms in Japan. One later sexually assaulted a college girl in the U.S. and then killed himself.
Despite VA Reforms, Military Women Struggle Silently With Sexual Trauma
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On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced reforms to the rules for claiming veterans’ benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder. The White House says the move will ease the burden of proof that veterans face when trying to prove the mental wounds of war. But the new regulations are silent on the suffering of women who have experienced sexual trauma in the military.
The new rules essentially give vets a greater benefit of the doubt by simplifying the process for proving a PTSD claim, as long as a VA-approved psychologist or psychiatrist affirms that it is “consistent with the places, types, and circumstances of the Veteran’s service.”
But the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), an advocacy group for current and former military women, has warned that the new criteria do not apply equally to the process of proving sexual assault related to military service.
Despite study after study showing that military sexual trauma (MST) is both widespread and underreported in all branches of the military, the VA has been accused of ignoring many cases of sexual harassment, rape and other sexual crimes that fall outside the conventional categories of combat injuries. The new PTSD regulations thus offer little comfort to the traumatized victims of sexual abuse, who already struggle with stigma, shame and fear.
Anuradha K. Bhagwati, a former Marine captain and executive director of SWAN, recently testified before Congress:
Filing for disability compensation for MST is universally considered a traumatic, agonizing, and cruel experience. Many survivors describe the process of re-writing one’s personal narrative for a VA claim as just as traumatic as the original rape or harassment.
VBA claims officers nationwide have proven themselves entirely inept when dealing with MST claims. Claims are routinely rejected, even with sufficient evidence of a stressor and a corroborating diagnosis from a VA health provider. Many survivors’ claims are rejected because of VBA’s lack of knowledge about sexual violence…
Current VBA policy is forcing women and men with insufficient evidence of their assault and harassment to suffer in silence and shame, to numb their pain through use of substances, and to take or attempt to take their own lives.
Going forward, the service women who will be affected by the new VA policy are disproportionately women of color. As Colorlines reported back in 2008, women of color in the military may struggle against racial barriers within their own ranks; when sexual assault or abuse enters the picture, inequalities in access to VA services could be psychologically crippling.
Bhagwati argued in a New York Times roundtable last week, “The V.A.’s double standard when it comes to survivors of sexual trauma is shameful. We’ve got nothing to celebrate until all sources of P.T.S.D. are considered equal.”
The debate will likely continue as Congress weighs the COMBAT PTSD Act, which would further ease the claims process by enabling vets to rely on evidence provided by private mental health workers rather than just VA-approved clinicians, who may be biased in their diagnosis, or inaccessible to veterans living in underserved communities.
For now, it looks like survivors of military sexual trauma will continue to face discrimination when they come forward, whether to seek justice or just to receive basic mental health care. Their silent struggle for equity shows that for all the talk about soldiers being equal when they wear the uniform, race and gender still color the military experience in unspoken ways.
Photo: SWAN
"Culture" Cop-Out Won’t Stop Rape in Eastern Congo
01 year ago
Many in Africa hoped that World Cup fanfare would wash away some of the disturbing images that generally dominate the Western press coverage of African nations. Now that the glow is fading, how will the world treat the crisis in DR Congo, which has historically been either ignored or chronically misunderstood?
The brutal war in eastern Congo has become synonymous with rape as a military tactic. But while the problem is real, sensationalism combined with subrosa racism have created a swirl of fictions that dull the international response.
Lisa Shannon argues in the International Herald Tribune that as long as people in rich nations view rape as culturally entrenched in Congolese society, we blind ourselves to our collective responsibility:
When we blame all Congolese men for sexual violence, not only do we imply that rape is inherent to the African landscape, we avoid critical questions, particularly regarding the role that we in the West play
Who has been silent during 12 years of mass rape and off-the-charts atrocities? We have.
Who funds the bloodshed with our hunger for the latest computer processor and smart phone produced with minerals from Congo? We do. Perhaps unwittingly, but we do.
Who helped the fighters get their guns? We did. …
When we label rape in Congo “cultural,” we let ourselves off the hook. And that is a cultural issue. Ours.
The abuses committed by international forces counter the rape-culture myth even more directly. Not long ago, the United Nations acknowledged that its own troops–far from “keeping the peace–have actually contributed to the climate of lawlessness driving sexual violence, and in many cases, they engaged in sexual misconduct themselves.
The Congolese government stirred controversy with a recent request that the U.N. begin drawing down its troops and shifting toward civilian missions despite the ongoing carnage. But Annie Rashidi-Mulumba at the Daily Beast challenged the assumption that international forces were Congo’s last hope:
Given this background, it may be that my government is analyzing the UN presence in these terms: A multi-million dollar UN-peace keeping operation has been in Congo for 10 years with more than 22,000 officers. How can it be that the number of civilians dying and in extreme need is still rising? How come Congo is home to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world since the Second World War
Clearly, the United Nations peacekeeping force is not effective. A change is needed.
There is urgent need to focus on the protection of civilians by fighting Congo’s culture of impunity toward law-breaking. There should be absolutely no tolerance for those responsible for sex crimes….
At the most basic level, we need to restore Congo by investing in the country’s civilians, not just its army. Proceeds from mining should fund social projects such as schools and hospitals.
Netfa Freeman at Black Agenda Report draws a straight line between Africa’s colonial legacy and the political distortion of the current crisis:
Only the deliberately blind among social justice advocates can fail to see the connection between the present state of Africa in general and Congo in particular versus imperialism on the other side. There are those, however, who claim to work on behalf of the interests of Africa and her people, claim to work for the interests of Congolese but who insist on embracing an approach out of sync with the lessons of history and out of sync with the current exigencies of Africa and her children, scattered and suffering throughout the world.
Human rights activists have joined an international campaign against the trafficking of conflict minerals, which help finance the warfare of the DRC’s various armed groups. The effort, like the Save Darfur campaign, follows the consumer-oriented humanitarian vogue that has made waves in the American media. The website does provide background information on sexual violence that emphasizes structural factors, such as poverty, lack of health care and the chaos bred by military conflict as the root causes, along with “gender inequality and culture barriers.”
Such initiatives might raise public awareness and spur political action. But it remains to be seen whether the messaging around the war in eastern Congo can compel people to recognize sexual violence not as an indigenous scourge of a failed state, but a byproduct of globalized ignorance.
Naomi Campbell Wants No Part in Locking Up a War Criminal
01 year ago
It sounds like the plot line for an action film.
A warlord, then actually the head of an African state, is at a party at Nelson Mandela’s house. He meets a supermodel and is so taken by her that he sends one of his guys to her room, where the sleepy supermodel opens the door and is given a blood diamond, a diamond that’s been mined in a war zone for the sole purpose of financing brutal activities.
Years later, the warlord is charged with crimes against humanity, including the rape of women and girls and having people shot and then hacked to pieces, and with using blood diamonds to pay for the killings. A friend of the supermodel’s, a famous actress, tells the international court that the supermodel told her she’d received a blood diamond. The supermodel fears for her life.
It would be a good plot line for a movie if it weren’t for the fact that it might be reality.
For the last three years, the former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been on trial in a UN-backed court for arming and leading rebels in Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war between 1996 and 2002. Now, the actress Mia Farrow claims that supermodel Naomi Campbell told her she received a blood diamond from Taylor in 1997. The warlord has denied ever having such diamonds so Campbell’s testimony could show that he’s lying and help further the case against him.
There’s just one problem: Campbell doesn’t want to testify. She told Oprah: “I don’t want to be involved in this man’s case–he has done some terrible things and I don’t want to put my family in danger,” she said.
Last week, the Special Court for Sierra Leone ordered Campbell to appear to testify on July 29 or face a prison term of up to seven years, a fine of about $500, or both, according to the subpoena. Campbell’s spokespeople aren’t commenting on what the supermodel will do next. The tribunal doesn’t have its own police so it would ask go to where Campbell lives–the UK– and ask the British police to do the work for them.
(Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Is the DREAM Act a Military Recruiter’s Dream, too?
01 year ago
Activists across the country have rallied around the DREAM Act as a first step toward comprehensive immigration reform. The DREAM Act, which broadens undocumented youths’ access to higher education, basically granting conditional relief to enable students to finish their degrees, is framed as a “noncontroversial” concept that rational people, even conservative-leaning folks, would find hard to oppose on moral grounds. In fact, even the Pentagon is a big fan, according to a documentary recently featured on Democracy Now!. Really.
In Yo Soy El Army, media activist Marco Amador looks at the backstory behind the DREAM Act in his exploration of the Pentagon’s predation on Latino communities. While the DREAM Act has inspired bold activism led by educators and students, its status as a pillar of the immigration reform movement is somewhat undercut, the film suggests, by the taint of the military recruitment machine. Specifically, the bill contains a provision that offers military service as an option, alongside higher education, as a “path to citizenship.”
JORGE MARISCAL: The dream, really, of citizenship is the main thing that people—that recruiters offer. Related to that is something called the DREAM Act. Now, the DREAM Act would actually take noncitizen youths, who have been raised here, who were brought here as children, are bilingual, bicultural, fluent in English, and graduated from high school, that would allow them to serve in the military in exchange for temporary permanent residency…What one has to realize about the DREAM Act is that the military option wasn’t attached. The military option was there at the beginning. The Pentagon helped write the DREAM Act. That’s what people have to realize.
Controversy emerged in the activist community over the military-related provisions of the act a few years ago when it was proposed and ultimately quashed in the ugly wrangling over immigration on Capitol Hill. Justin Akers Chacon and Lee Sustar wrote in a 2007 Socialist Worker commentary that the DREAM Act would encourage the encroachment of the military on a vulnerable population of struggling youth. Given the economic hardships and other barriers many young immigrants face, which often put education out of reach, regardless of immigration status, the military could be a tantalizing alternative to hitting the books. The possibility that the DREAM Act would present higher education as a channel to legalization alongside the slick PR machines of the armed services has alarmed more radical activists, especially since the military already welcomes non-citizens as soldiers. Chacon and Sustar cautioned:
Progressive opponents of the DREAM Act don’t deny the positive emphasis on education and the need to create a path to legalization. Instead, they point out that the education options under the proposed law would be highly limited for many, if not most, immigrant youth. As a result, they argue, the DREAM Act would become primarily a means to corral immigrants into the military.
The article quotes Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin‘s rationale as reported in the Army Times:
“Largely due to the war in Iraq, the Army is struggling to meet its recruitment goals,” he said. “Under the DREAM Act, tens of thousands of well-qualified potential recruits would become eligible for military service for the first time. They are eager to serve in the armed forces during a time of war.”
The featured excerpt of Yo Soy El Army also details the marketing strategy used by savvy recruiters. One officer matter-of-factly explained her racial theory:
LT. COL. MARGARET STOCK: Many Latinos are comfortable with a more conservative or traditional lifestyle, I suppose you might say. They’re not—they’re able to handle a hierarchical military structure where people in charge will give orders and everybody else is expected to follow the orders. There are some communities that are less likely to be interested in that kind of lifestyle. But generally speaking—and again, this is, you know, a generalization—Latinos adjust pretty well to that kind of lifestyle.
Funny how these kinds of “generalizations” cut both ways. Remember, Stock is talking about the docile, loyal, diligent immigrants that the hard right likes, not to be confused with the throngs of “illegals” overrunning Arizona, who display no respect for law and order and threaten to undermine the American way of life. The bad immigrants, by this logic, deserve their own separate legislation and a one-way ticket back over the border, courtesy state lawmakers and Homeland Security. But the good ones can get sent across the border under more auspicious circumstances, to spread democracy abroad with automatic weapons, courtesy our uniformed services.
Amador isn’t an absolutist about the DREAM Act, but he’s also not blind to the compromises that were needed to make the legislation viable in a political arena where immigrants are welcome to the extent that they can be exploited:
Now, within the military ranks… They understand that college is an expensive alternative for a lot of these folks, so they’re offering the military. And they say it very blatantly. …
Now, we’re not, you know, focusing or saying that the students, you know, the youth that are involved in the DREAM movement are at fault here. What we’d like to understand is, do the organizations fully understand the implications of accepting the militarization of the immigrant rights movement?
As we’ve reported before, the role of people of color in the military is fraught with moral and political questions about patriotism, self-empowerment and increasingly, the meaning of citizenship. As activists struggle to secure freedom for undocumented youth, I hope that the movement keeps its eyes open as it awakens to the troubling side of their dream.
Tavis Revives the Less Loved, More Anti-War MLK, Jr.
01 year ago
Tavis Smiley’s up to more than squabbling with Rev. Al Sharpton and hashing out the “Black agenda”. Tonight, PBS will air the second episode of his four-part, year-long series of special reports. This one will try to unearth a part of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s radical legacy that’s been largely scrubbed from our memory: His strong and controversial advocacy against the Vietnam war.
Smiley zeros in on King’s April 4, 1967, speech, in which he first publicly criticized the war, drawing scorn from a wide swath of news media and from the White House. Many had urged King to avoid the growing public debate about Vietnam. They feared — rightly, it turns out — that King would alienate important allies in the civil rights movement and distract from his central campaign against racial justice. King, however, believed no racial justice campaign could truly succeed without addressing what he called “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”
Smiley’s program, “MLK: A Call to Conscience,” digs into both the speech and the aftermath. But as Smiley told Democracy Now in an interview about the program Monday morning, it also explores the inevitable comparison to Barack Obama. Both are Nobel Peace Prize winners, and Obama invoked King in his own speech accepting the award. Smiley says that fact irked those in King’s circle he interviewed:
In that speech, Amy, he makes a turn and talks about the fact—and I’m paraphrasing here—that he can’t be guided by King’s notion of nonviolence in today’s world. And he suggests he couldn’t do that because King didn’t know al-Qaeda. And that really—and he goes deeper than that, but he really starts to rankle some who have been—you know, who worked with and advised Dr. King. Harry Belafonte and others talk in this special about how that really pricked them, and some of them felt insulted by that, as if Dr. King did not know violence in his lifetime and as if he could not intellectually wrestle with the violence, the terrorism that we’re up against today, but most importantly, the notion that nonviolence in today’s world is irrelevant and could not make a difference. So it’s a fascinating conversation about the parallels, and yet, at the same time, the tension, on the issue of war and peace between King and Obama.
This summer, Smiley will team up with Jonathan Demme to turn the series’ focus to New Orleans’ rebuilding progress five years after Katrina.